Opening the Doors of Perception: Oliver Stone and Val Kilmer at Laurel Canyon

Opening the Doors of Perception: Oliver Stone and Val Kilmer at Laurel Canyon

Oliver Stone wrote and directed the 1991 movie The Doors, which starred Val Kilmer as Jim Morrison. Paul Rothchild, who was the producer of the original band’s music, personally selected Kilmer. Stone was familiar with Kilmer from doing theater productions with Sean Penn at 17 at Juilliard. Kilmer, Penn, and Kevin Bacon were in the theater production the “Stab Boys.”

The Doors was partially filmed at Laurel Canyon. The Canyon was not only a neighborhood where military brats turned into rockstars, but it was a military facility that manufactured culture. It was the cultural nerve center in the 1960s.

ABC7 Reported on September 7, 2011:

Out of the tumultuous 1960s, a new consciousness formed among the youth of the time. Holding fast to the belief that peace and love could change the world, hippies sprouted throughout Laurel Canyon – a woodsy, mountainous area in Los Angeles that connects the San Fernando Valley on one side of the hill, to the Sunset Strip on the other. It was the perfect breeding ground for up-and-coming musicians as it was inexpensive to live there (about $100 would rent you a pretty great house at the top of Kirkwood) and the heart of the music world, the Sunset Strip, was only a thumb ride down the hill.

The Doors film immortalized the lead singer of the group, Jim Morrison, which I always thought was odd. Stone volunteered for service during the Vietnam war, and there were no sunset strips for Stone in the jungles of Nam, while Morrison avoided the military during the war.

Another odd thing about this film is Val Kimmer played a “young, dumb and full of cum” pilot that fires on all cylinders nicknamed the “Iceman” in the 1986 Pentagon DoD propaganda film Top Gun, and now he’s playing a free loving hippy.

In the book National Security Cinema: The Shocking New Evidence of Government Control in Hollywood written on June 27, 2017 by Matthew Alford and Tom Secker. Pg 33..

In 1986, Top Gun was a great success as a Navy promotional film. In its wake, the CIA reconsidered its approach to Hollywood.

Obviously a movie about a flower power hippy would not be a military recruiting advertisement like Top Gun, so the DoD was not involved with The Doors film.

Top Gun reinvigorated the military image as “cool and fun” in the same year Oliver Stone made the film Platoon starring Charlie Sheen, set in the jungles of Vietnam, a place that is too familiar to Stone, who was a Vietnam veteran. Platoon was brutally honest about the war in many ways and was not made as a recruitment advertisement, but instead the goal for Stone seemed to be to make the viewing audience taste the “napalm” from their air conditioned seats.

“National Security Cinema: The Shocking New Evidence of Government Control in Hollywood” published on June 27, 2017 by Matthew Alford and Tom Secker. Pg 162:

Stone’s full gamut of work, we see a quite comprehensive interrogation of US exceptionalism. ..Platoon (1986) extensively depicted the horrific rape of a Vietnamese girl by US forces…

Do you have a war film in mind and want to strike gold ? Nobody is better than Capt. Dale Dye who consulted with Stone for Platoon to instill into the liberal sissy kids of Hollywood that “thousand yard stare” that you could only get from seeing your battle buddies intestines on the jungle floor. Making boys cold blooded killers on the silver screen is a Stone and Dye specialty.

“Johnny Depp and Charlie Sheen” were in Hollywood, but Dale said when you’re in the jungles of the Philippines you are “bravo team now.” He told his FX guy to use real explosion so dirt would fly and shrapnel would go everywhere. After the captain scares the shit out of bravo team then it’s time for cameras to start rolling. I love this guy!

Working with Stone is method acting on steroids. “Put those boys in the shit!”

Francis Ford Coppola has been a favorite film director for the DoD, showing the idealism of what the military’s purpose is supposed to be. In 1970 he directed the film Patton. In reality it’s more like Platoon where young boys get scared and start spraying hot lead, killing anything and everything.

Coppola in 1979 founded his own movie studio apart from Hollywood and directed the movie about the horrors of Nam, seven years before Oliver Stone.

In the jungles of the Philippines while filming “Apocalypse Now”, the cast and crew all took part of the collective insanity stemming from Francis’ mind.

Martin Sheen, father of Charlie Sheen, played Willard and Marlon Brando play Kurtz.

Francis‘ nephew is Nicolas Cage, which goes to show you the crazy runs in their family.

Jim Morrison’s band produced the wild-eyed music in the background of the “Apocalypse Now” opening scene.

Rolling Stone wrote

”The End” crawls through Martin Sheen’s war-ravaged brain, Apocalypse Now taps into the late Jim Morrison’s heart of darkness. It brought the posthumous Morrison cult to a whole new level; a couple of years later, Jim appeared on the cover of the Rolling Stone with the best headline ever: “He’s hot, he’s sexy and he’s dead.””

Morrison was the self-destructing Dionysian figure and self-proclaimed “lizard king” that avoided military service because of father Admiral George Stephen Morrison’s military connections. Jim on the surface was a hippy pinko, but covertly Morrison was serving the CIA clandestine services through the MK ultra mind control program and promoting LSD to hippy anti-war protesters to stifle them from protesting against the Vietnam War. LSD makes the user look inward and lose interest anything out of the user’s shell, including social affairs. Thus, the appetite for change is no more and users of LSD become willing slaves, which is the goal of the MK ultra program – unwitting slaves.

The Doors got their name from Aldous Huxley’s 1954 book The Doors Of Perception about Huxley’s use of LSD.

Aldous Huxley’s brother was the first Director of UNESCO and mentor to George Orwell. No one knew how controlled opposition works quite like Orwell. Morrison was an Emmanuel Goldstein for the Vietnam War effort, faux opposition concocted by Big Brother, just as in Orwell’s book 1984.

The MK Ultra kids of Laurel Canyon often used LSD. Laurel Canyon was a military/intelligence complex of the 1960s, and many of the leading figures were children of military personnel and CIA officers. According to David McGowan most of the MK mind control children couldn’t play an instrument so they had to use studio musicians on their albums.

Morrison is a creation of the military industrial complex from birth; Jim Morrison’s father was as deep as an Admiral can get in the NWO and even MK’ed his own son for the cause. Admiral George Stephen Morrison orchestrated the Gulf of Tonkin incident in 1964 that accelerated the Vietnam War.

“Jim Morrison’s dad had a hand in starting the Vietnam War” by Ward Carroll:

..first week of August, 1964, and U.S. warships under the command of U.S. Navy Admiral George Stephen Morrison have allegedly come under attack while patrolling Vietnam’s Tonkin Gulf. This event, subsequently dubbed the ‘Tonkin Gulf Incident,’ will result in the immediate passing by the U.S. Congress of the obviously pre-drafted Tonkin Gulf Resolution..”

Jim Morrison, who for a time lived in a home on Rothdell Trail, behind the Laurel Canyon Country Store, may or may not have died in Paris on July 3, 1971. The events of that day remain shrouded in mystery and rumor, and the details of the story, such as they are, have changed over the years. What is known is that, on that very same day, Admiral George Stephen Morrison delivered the keynote speech at a decommissioning ceremony for the aircraft carrier USS Bon Homme Richard, from where, seven years earlier, he had helped choreograph the Tonkin Gulf Incident. A few years after Jim’s death, his common-law wife, Pamela Courson, dropped dead as well, officially of a heroin overdose. Like Hendrix, Morrison had been an avid student of the occult, with a particular fondness for the work of Aleister Crowley. According to super-groupie Pamela DesBarres, he had also “read all he could about incest and sadism.” Also like Hendrix, Morrison was just twenty-seven at the time of his (possible) death.”

“Weird Scenes Inside the Canyon: Jay’s Review” by Jay Dyer

McGowan’s thesis is simple: The 1960s counter-culture movement was not what it appeared to be. In a purple haze of pot smoke, free love, booze and LSD tabs, the fog of the 60s is believed by most baby-boomers to be a genuine (monstrous for faux conservatives) reaction against the system. From student protests to politically active musicians, the anti-war, anti-establishment ethos of the 60s was, so the story goes, a natural, organic reaction to a hawkish, greedy corporate demon, embodied in “the man,” opposed by all those revolutionaries who love freedom, expressing themselves in the “arts.”

McGowan begins his argumentation by pointing to Jim Morrison’s father, Navy Admiral George Stephen Morrison, who played a central role in the Gulf of Tonkin’s false flag event. Morrison, curiously, avoided this association, stating his parents were dead, adding fuel to his mythical narrative of having no musical training and supposedly becoming a musical shaman following ghostly encounters and hallucinogenic trips. While some of that may have been the case (such as the trips and witchcraft initiation, for example, as shown in Oliver Stone’s The Doors),

the real story is likely much closer to McGowan’s analysis – Morrison was promoted and made into an icon by the system because of these high level connections. However, being well-connected was not the only explanation – the establishment had a specific motive of derailing any legitimate anti-war activism or artwork, as well as moving the culture into a more degenerate state for social engineering…(The CIA favorite mind control drug in the 1960’s was)..LSD was directly associated with Fort Detrick and biological warfare programs. “Managers” and “agents” like Herb Cohen were not merely industry fat cats, but mobsters (connected to Mickey Cohen..

As mentioned, Paul Rothchild, who produced the Doors’ albums, assisted Oliver Stone in picking the right man for the job. The Rothschilds always had an eye for talent. By Eye, I mean single All-Seeing eye inside of a capstone. Jim Morrison was an agent of the “Illuminati” and in the 1990’s Val carried that torch.

..(Kilmer)..speaks respectfully of how Paul Rothchild, who produced the Doors’ albums and worked on the film, gave him one of his two copies — only 50 are extant — of Morrison’s vanity-published book of poetry, “An American Prayer.” ….He learned 50 songs for the film — 15 are actually performed on screen. And there was always the possibility that if Kilmer didn’t sound exactly like Morrison, they would dub in Morrison’s voice. “But as it turned out, everything live in the film is me,” Kilmer says proudly.

“Except for five lines,” Paul Rothchild notes. “One is a scream.” He won’t divulge the others. Stone did intertwine the voices of Morrison and Kilmer, but basically, when you see Kilmer singing in the film, he really is singing. Morrison’s voice is used as background music in other scenes.

Rothchild was Kilmer’s main guide on his journey to the center of Jim Morrison’s mind and music. “I spent hundreds of hours with him interrogating me about what Jim would think in this or that situation,” says Rothchild, who’s listed as music producer on the film and who now runs his own company providing music for films and video. “We might have been out to dinner, for instance, and a waiter would do something and he would say, what would Jim have done there? I kept on filling his cup with anecdotes, stories, tragic moments, humorous moments, how Jim thought, what were my interpretations of Jim’s lyrics. That became more of the focus of the singing character than actually the mechanics of the singing.”

Kilmer was already living in the right environment. Both he and Rothchild have houses not far from Morrison’s onetime home in Laurel Canyon. A dark, steep-sided canyon above West Hollywood, it was once the favored enclave of a funky artistic crowd. Rothchild also took him into the studio and coached him the way he did Morrison. And he rehearsed Kilmer in the quirks of Morrison’s voice. “I would help him in some pronunciations, idiomatic things that Jim would do that made the song sound like Jim. One of the most famous ones is the word ‘fire,’ ” Rothchild says referring, of course, to the Doors’ phenomenally successful “Light My Fire.” “It’s really pronounced ‘fi-yah.’ Jim never said ‘fire.’ ”

Rothchild, a veteran of more than 30 years in the music business, was certainly a close-up witness to Doors history. He produced all of the Doors’ albums except the last one. Kilmer, Rothchild says admiringly, “knows Jim Morrison better than Jim ever knew himself. He’s nailed — to the extent that the Doors themselves had difficulty telling whether it was Val singing or Jim singing. Early on, I’d bring them into a recording studio and I randomly switched Val and Jim and they guessed wrong 80 percent of the time.”

…Rothchild is satisfied with the honesty of the film’s depiction of the declining Morrison who, for example, tempted fate by walking balustrades drunk and stoned. “That was a day in the life! It was not extraordinary,” says Rothchild. In one scene, a drunken Morrison is making a pathetic attempt to record in the studio while his girlfriend performs oral sex on him. “That scene is so accurate,” says Rothchild. “It happened during the second album. And the song was ‘You’re Lost, Little Girl.’ ”
Rothchild says, “I hope it comes through how dangerous it was to be with Jim Morrison — dangerous to be in a car, dangerous to cross a street, dangerous to be in a recording studio, because he could destroy your mind. He pushed buttons on you daily.

If Oliver Stone wanted to make “The Doors” realistic in same way that he made “Platoon” realistic, with Captain Dale Dye with the loud explosions that were meant to traumatize the actors, it’s not a leap of logic to think Rothschild and Stone took Kilmer to Laurel Canyon to mind-butcher him.

Kilmer is “toys in the attic” crazy; Jim Morrison has nothing on Kilmer. Kilmer’s mental breakdown while making this movie was something that he would never recover from. Jim lives on in Val.

“After filming “The Doors” Val Kilmer underwent therapy just to get out of character” published Oct 7, 2016 by Goran Blazeski

(Kilmer)..took method acting to the extreme while preparing for the role of Jim Morrison in Oliver Stone’s The Doors. Kilmer allegedly spent many hours in the studio listening to Doors songs and learning in depth Morrison’s approach to each song.

Prior to the audition, Val Kilmer spent thousands of dollars to produce his own video, shot in his rented Laurel Canyon home with professional assistance in order to get the role. Oliver Stone wasn’t impressed with the video, but the producer Paul Rothchild found the home video more intriguing and he convinced Oliver Stone that Val was the right person for the role.

Prior to production, Val Kilmer lived just like Jim Morrison for a year, dressing in his clothes and listening to his music. He even copied the way he walked and behaved. The actor also spent hundreds of hours interrogating Paul Rothchild, a producer for the iconic rock band and a consultant on the film. Eventually, he knew more about Jim than anybody in the film crew.

Val Kilmer was getting so obsessed with the role that, by the end of filming, he had everyone on set referring to him as “Jim,” all of the time. When members of The Doors heard Kilmer singing their songs, they could not tell the difference between his voice and Morrison’s.

When he finished filming he had to go to therapy because it was hard for him to get out of the character. That is how far he went just to “get it right.”